Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Increasing Cost of Healthcare

Visualizing Medicare data revealed several interesting financial aspects of our healthcare system. By viewing the state and classification heat map, it is apparent that California, Nevada, and New Jersey have the highest average costs. It is especially odd for New Jersey given its proximity to Maryland, which has the lowest state costs. Also interesting is the scatter plot of Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) codes, which reveals several outliers in terms of cost and patient volume. Public health administrators looking to bring down costs could use this visualization to identify procedures with the highest costs and frequency that would most benefit from efficiency improvements.